Creativity Across the Disciplines: Stan Lai and Bruce Beasley in conversationModerated by ARC Director and Professor Shannon Jackson

Join ARC for a public dialogue with master artists and UC Berkeley alumni, sculptor Bruce Beasley (Art Practice, ’62) and playwright Stan Lai (TDPS, ’83), as they discuss creativity and the arts. ARC Director Shannon Jackson will moderate as the two artists explore the nature of creativity in both the visual and performing arts. We will consider how both Beasley’s sculptures and Lai’s theatrical work circulate — in the Bay Area, in the United States, in China, and around the world—in order to understand the techniques and creative impulses of two distinct global art practices.

About Bruce Beasley: Born in Los Angeles in 1939, Beasley is recognized as one of the most noteworthy and innovative sculptors on the West Coast. He began his art studies at Dartmouth College before transferring to the UC Berkeley art department in 1959. Beasley has traveled to Japan, Mexico, China, Hong Kong, Germany, Alaska, and Spain to lecture and attend exhibits and installations of his work. A self-described “unrepentant modernist,” he advanced the idea of sculpture with formal structures that could be simultaneously observed in multiple views. Never static, Beasley continues to work from his West Oakland compound, using new materials and new technologies.

About Stan Lai: Stan Lai (Lai Shengchuan) is the most celebrated Chinese language playwright and director in the world. Based in Taiwan, where he founded the influential theatre group Performance Workshop, Lai’s work has profoundly transformed the path of theatre in Taiwan and China today. Lai’s most famous work Secret Love In Peach Blossom Land (1986), which is perhaps the single most influential modern theatre work in China, combines tragedy and comedy in a most creative way, has toured worldwide, been made into an award-winning film (1992), and in 2007 was chosen as one of the top ten Chinese plays of the 20th century. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1954, Lai was educated in America and Taiwan, and received his Ph.D. in Dramatic Art from UC Berkeley in 1983. He has received Taiwan’s highest award for the arts, the National Arts Award, an unprecedented two times (1988, 2001). In 2007, Lai received the prestigious Taipei Cultural Award, and in Beijing was elected into the Chinese theater Hall of Fame. In 2011, in Taipei he received the Grand Cordon, Order of the Brilliant Star Medal from President Ma, the highest civilian honor of the Republic of China.

Creativity Across the Disciplines: Stan Lai and Bruce Beasley in Conversation is a program of the Arts Research Center, UC Berkeley, with co-sponsoring funds from the Institute of East Asian Studies.

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The Arts Research Center at University of California, Berkeley is a think tank for the arts, a genuinely interdisciplinary space that brings people together--from across the university and beyond the university, from across the arts and beyond the arts--for unexpected conversations, collaborations, and community-building.